Tech Stuff - Survival Guides

We forget stuff - frequently. These survival guides are meant as quick (some of them a pretty long) and dirty (no smut) overviews of various, mostly open-source, software that we use on both Linux and FreeBSD and, depending on the software, occasionally on Windows. While some may call this kind of thing a cheat-sheet we prefer the term survival guide since it plays to our sense of the dramatic and on more than one occasion was only a modest exaggeration.

If this stuff is useful - we will all be very happy. If it is not useful - well that's just too bad. Though if we do miss something obvious you could drop us an email.

The general style of each guide is to describe the basic functions - locations, logging, configuration files, basic commands and the occasional weird stuff (it seemed important at the time) and then link to more detailed sources where appropriate.

The beginning of a new section on digital audio - since the field is enormous these pages are a mere splash in the ocean. But they make a nice sound. Equalization. Glossary. Frequencies and harmonics, digital sound primer, acoustic calculator. And some other stuff even we forget.

All you never wanted to know about SSL/TLS and X.509 certificates - including generating self-signed certificates with OpenSSL. Gruesome stuff. Take a couple of days off after reading this section. Be warned this page is huge (or should that be yuuuge).

We always feelt guilty when looking at those ANS.1 SEQUENCE...SET...CHOICE snippets that are scattered all over the X.509/PKI RFCs. We vaguely understood what they did. Then we had to write a DER decoder and vaguely was no longer acceptable. After numerous blind alleys we finally got there. This mind-numbing page may help you get there faster. There again, it may not.

We had an 'up close and personal' encounter recently with wxWidgets (2.8.10). Gobs of documentation. Really superb job. However, we couldn't find anything on tooltips, menus and context menus (a.k.a. popup menus). Bound to be there. But where? This page was the result.

A recent project forced us to use Java. There are a ton of resources on the web for Java developers. Hugely reduced our learning curve (as C/C++ guys). However, we could find no solution to intercepting editing in HTML forms. And then we needed to force the Submit button. Stubborness found solutions as documented on this page. Also we took the opportunity to develop a simple (read limited) (X)SSI (Apache extended includes) expansion utility to allow HTML files with (X)SSI to be exported to non-(X)SSI supporting web servers or for use with HTML viewers.

Problems, comments, suggestions, corrections (including broken links) or something to add? Please take the time from a busy life to 'mail us' (at top of screen), the webmaster (below) or info-support at zytrax. You will have a warm inner glow for the rest of the day.